There are some interesting predictions for the geospatial sector that I’ve come across that identify some important trends for 2012 (not in any particular order). 

• The next great GIS isn’t a “GIS”–but rather…and here Brian Timoney goes on to talk about analytic and visualization tools that we will need in 2012 to deal with the “tides of Big Data, the sensor web, and the Internet of Things”.

Brian’s predictions reminded me of the talk that Robert W. Burkhardt, the Army Geospatial Information Officer (GIO), gave at a DLT event in June of 2010 in which he said that for the Army, at that time with access to more and better data sources than ther rest of us, in the past the lack of data was a problem, now the challenge is increasingly being able to integrate and analyze in order to extract information from the huge volumes of data that are now available.  His words were “extracting actionable information by exposing patterns from the huge, chaotic volume of data pouring out of many stovepipes.“ 

• Open source geospatial – Joe Francica predicts that open source gets its act together, specifically, Joe says that the “Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) needs to transition itself from a movement of programmers to a cohesive group of businesses that can leverage the movement.”  Joe predicts that “open source companies [will] step out of the shadows and become a marketing force. Either OSGeo takes the lead in supporting the group or individual companies will seek other professional support.“

Adena Schutzberg in her predictions goes a step further and predicts that “OpenGeo will do the hard work of building credibility (and support) for enterprise use of open source. It will do for open source GIS what Esri did for GIS. The company has and will continue to take the baton from OSGeo to get the software into wider spread use. (And it will make money doing so.)“

By way of background the open source geospatial movement started coalescing around 2005, the OSGeo was founded in 2006, and the movement and OSGeo have grown rapidly since then.  The annual OSGeo event, FOSS4G has been happening in various parts of the world since then.  Last year in Denver FOSS4G attracted about 900 attendees.

• Enterprise Geospatial – Joe Francica mentions three specific areas, cloud, big data analytics (echoing Brian Timoney’s prediction), and social business and mobile computing.

Cloud: Joe says that geospatial companies need to offer solution-based cloud services.  “Google has Google Earth Builder; Esri has ArcGIS.com and the others better get on the band wagon or die.” He also sees geospatial data and software being offered by integrated companies, for example, “GeoEye buying a company like PCI Geomatics or DigitalGlobe buying or merging with Exelis VIS.”  Adena Schutzberg predicts that in 2012 the biggest impact that cloud computing will have will be on education.  “Educators can and will teach introductory courses using 100% Web resources by the end of 2012.“

Big data analytics – Joe predicts that “location intelligence will move in this direction and lead big data analytics.“

Social Business & Mobile Computing – Joe sees “a movement toward location-based business (LBB): taking all the aspects of Internet socialization and combining this with the mobile ecosphere.  Salesforce.com is doing it and you see just about every enterprise software company coming out with some form of mobile business application. The element of location-based business will be huge.“